Telling Small Stories — About a Banana In This Case

It is quite possible that this post adds up to nothing. But, on this cold-clear day after Christmas, it has two good stories in it, so it is not, I think, a total loss.

I have just finished, two minutes ago, a fine essay by Paul Willis (in his forthcoming book To Build a Trail) about his interviewing the poet Mary Oliver. It is filled with a car-load of revelatory details, including her need to smoke a cigarette just before the event. And it ends with an excellent punch line: “And I still haven’t washed the smoke from my jacket.”

I had a jacket like that once—with an unwashed banana stain. Here’s the story: I was leading a group of college students through Stratford. We had front row seats (actually cheaper than the ones behind) for a performance at the Royal Shakespeare Company main stage of, I think, As You Like It. One of the characters came on stage with a banana. He was about twenty feet from me. He peeled it as he delivered his lines. It was clear he was going, at some point, to take a big bite.

Just before that point, however, he gestured with the hand holding the banana, causing it to break off at his fist, bounce once or twice on the stage and hit me, sitting in the front row, on the lapel of my sports coat. The actor looked at the stump of the banana in his hand and then looked at me. He had nothing left to bite.

Being of sound and nimble mind, I reached down for the banana on the floor, stood and threw it back toward the actor. He grabbed it out of the air and took a big bite. Cheers for us both resounded! I was, however briefly, a member of the acting company of the famed RSC!

And, like Paul with Mary Oliver’s smoke, I did not wash off that banana stain, instead watching it, over time, dry up and flake away. It suffered, as are Paul and I, the fate of all things temporal.

“And, like Paul with Mary Oliver’s smoke, I did not wash off that banana stain, instead watching it, over time, dry up and flake away. It suffered, as are Paul and I, the fate of all things temporal.”

Okay, as you might have guessed, I think there is a point or two to be made from these two stories, points that hadn’t quite coalesced for me until this telling of them. A first one is the common observation that stories beget stories. They insist are prolific, meaning, literally, having many offspring. (Chick Hearn used to like describing Elgin Baylor as “a prolific scorer.”) Second, these two stories arise from exactly the kind of unforeseeable details in life that give it color, dimension, and pleasure—at the moment they occur and in our memories of the occurrence. I get as much pleasure at this moment in remembering the banana as I did at the time of The Great Banana Toss. (See, it has become mythic.) This is a use of memory—the preservation of small victories over the pain and boredom that might otherwise characterize life.

And now I spiritualize to a third point, a bit more of a stretch perhaps. (But why not? All spiritual claims are necessarily a stretch, including the denial of the spiritual.) These story moments are, for those with eyes to see it so, a brief glimpse of our lives as they were intended to be—moments of surprise and pleasure and small infusions of grace. Remembering them, and telling and retelling the stories, is right and good. Stories of smoke and bananas.